Central to Christian theological perspectives on criminal punishment is the requirement of discerning the difference Jesus Christ makes for Christian understanding and possible participation in society’s meting out of punishment.
I advance here a thesis significantly indebted to Hauerwas’s work; a Christian praxis of good punishment offers a healing politics of better hope for society’s practice of criminal justice.
Good punishment, as an embodied Christian praxis, involves a particular story-informed and worshipful practice of “healing memory†in the service of “ontological intimacy.†Essentially, good punishment involves a peaceable Christian politics of healing the memories of wrongdoing by way of the acknowledgement of sin within a communal setting of forgiveness and reconciliation.
Ontological intimacy is the Christian confession that all things participate in the power of God’s being through bonds of radical communion.
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